Because let’s say you’re Tom Hanks. And you get TomHanks@Lemmy.World
Well, what’s stopping someone else from adopting TomHanks@Lemm.ee?
And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it’s him. But it’s actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.
Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.
The fix for this is for the guilds and unions that represent these celebrities to spin up their own instances. The suffix of the username granting the legitimacy.
It would solve the issue for people who look into it. But what if I registered AstralPath@Lemmy.World? I could pretend to be you. And because most people won’t check, I’d get away with it until people caught on.
Now if you make your living off your public image, and I say horrible things, your career could take a hit. Even if nothing I said is true, and its proven it was never you.
People will just remember “Hey, remember that time AstralPath admitted to having sex with their grandmother?”
“No, that wasn’t actually them.”
“Are you sure? I remember reading about it in (insert tabloid here)”.
And suddenly you have a legit reason not to use a platform that easily ruins your career through no fault of your own.
People will ALWAYS attempt to troll online for the memes. Remember Boaty McBoatface?
If your email address is lostmymind@outlook.com, what prevents someone to create lostmymind@gmail.com and pretend to be you?
If it was widely known that outlook was the legitimate suffix, there’s no need to worry about this. If SAG-AFTRA had their own instance then any actor’s account username associated with it would carry the suffix chosen by SAG-AFTRA.
TomHanks@sag-aftra.com for example.
TomHanks@lemmy.ml would be instantly recognizable as illegitimate.
This problem already exists in many different forms and is already managed well by the fact that celebrities’ real usernames are well known and bullshit posts from accounts trying to fake them are easily caught just by looking at the user name. There are plenty of parody accounts on X with very similar username formats. Is that a major problem for X users? Not from what I’ve seen.
A difference between kbin (and mbin?) vs lemmy (and pyfedi) - the former would show the entire name, including instance. If instance was not included, it was because it was local (so you could assume ‘@kbin.social’)
On lemmy/pyfedi the name shows up alone - though you can hover over and see the instance name. But at a glance I can see how someone could get confused. Not the best UX IMHO.
This would require some kind of federation alliance of instances that check each other’s usernames to ensure no duplicates over the whole network. Sure, maybe lemmy.shit doesn’t recognize the network, but then they don’t get federated with.
This is definitely possible, but it doesn’t seem to be happening.
Oh I’ve been thinking it needs an official alliance now for some time. Where a preagreed set of protocols are all adheard to. Just so all the services can play nicely with each other. Still decentralized in operation, but unified in experience.
And if some rouge instance wants to stay seperate, well, good luck growing hexbear.
Truthiness of a user should be determined with corroboration on 3rd party services.
Except no one will. If millions of people were on the fediverse, maybe 1% would confirm.
We live in a world where people read the headline and believe it, but don’t even open the article.
Then it doesn’t matter.
But it would.
Imagine Kamala Harris as president had a mastodon account. And somebody else made a duplicate Kamala Harris account. And this duplicate announced that the United States has gone to war with Russia.
Except these media stations don’t know how the fediverse works. They don’t know what an instance is. They just see Kamala Harris on social media announcing war.
And in media you HAVE to be the first to break the news story. So now you have every major news outlet confirming nuclear war, and the nation is panicing.
Meanwhile, Harris is trying to figure out how this all started. And this whole thing maybe lasts 10-60 minutes before somebody notices the mistake. Then it takes time to correct themselves and calm everybody down.
All over something that isn’t happening. All because people don’t check sources.
Now this is an extreme example, but I could see it happening if the fediverse was bigger, under it’s current setup.
Or, all accounts in the fedi are anonymous by nature, and if they need to be verified, they are verified on 3rd party sources.
Except they won’t.
Then return to the first clause.
Then people won’t sign up for it.
The fediverse as it stands right now is confusing enough as it is for new people. Now you’re saying you want to add in the chaos that comes from everybody being annonomous? They say that the internet, and trolling, and threats of violence are encouraged online because you’re annonomous. And now you want to highlight that feature on a service thats hard enough to grasp without nazis and death threats.
Yes, but you see. Lemmy users generally don’t give a flat fuck about what celebrities want.
I’m not here for celebrities and they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways, since they are all about the views.
they will always flock to centralized platforms anyways,
I’m trying to change that.
since they are all about the views.
Which is why if we make the fediverse normalized for celebrities to host content, they can get more views here.
I fully believe that this fediverse concept CAN be the future of the entire internet. Services that don’t even exist yet can integrate with the fediverse, and it can scale easily by it’s very nature. But there’s a LOT of rough edges that keep the normies away…for now.
Right now, the fediverse is more than just decentralized. It’s fractured.
Imagine posting an update on something, and it goes out to your mastodon, your Lemmy community, your pixelfed, and your peertube accounts. All at once. You wouldn’t follow services, you’d follow people.
But we’d need all these services to integrate with each other nicely. And part of that would be making it so you don’t have 7 different accounts for 7 different services. You have 1 account, and sign up for each service under that account.
All your notifications would go to the same place.
Your identity would be your username. People would know if it’s your username, it’s you.
But people here don’t really care that much about celebrities being here and maybe not even their username being unique. Could probably be anon1, anon2, etc and it wouldn’t matter that much, since real identity is probably not a draw for them. Focus on regular people wanting the userbase to want to use fediverse rather than celebrities which is an off-putting first impression and point of sale for lot of people here.
You need to pivot is what I’m saying to achieve what you want.
But you need to get the celebrities here first FOR the regular userbase to follow. Which is the whole point of the post.
It’s like those dog memes about the stick. “No take! Only throw!” Well, you have to take the stick first, THEN you can throw the stick.
Well, you need the celebrities here first, THEN the regular userbase will come.
So how do you get them here? Well first you make a list of every problem that would prevent a celebrity from coming here. Then iron out those rough edges first.
I’ve already talked in other posts prior how the only way to grow the userbase is to be welcoming of people that you have no interest in interacting with. But it’s fine. Because they don’t want to interact with you either. It doesn’t matter though because you can be on /c/Linuxmemes, and they can be on /c/homeandgarden.
And if Martha Stewart posted on /c/homeandgarden she’d bring her fanbase with her. And if Ozzy Osborn posted on /c/ozzybitesabat he’d bring his fanbase.
And so on and so on with each new celebrity. Some of them have overlap, some don’t. But you’re bringing more people, who create more instances, and then niche communities can develop. You get more people posting more content. And the platform grows with more varied topics than just politics, technology and video games.
Or you could ignore what the celebrities want, and google, and reddit, and instagram will always be the dominant platforms, while nobody will have ever heard of the fediverse.
I’m trying to bring the current system down.
“Celebrities” is quite a broad term.
I guess most people here were thinking about people they don’t really share values with (let’s say reality tv influencers for instance). On the other hand, if someone like Keanu Reeves for instance would do an AMA here, I’m pretty sure everyone would be happy and thankful for them to put some light on the Fediverse
A celebrity can host their own domain to prove authenticity.
So what. On Xitter I can make an account called Tom.Hanks and get the blue mark by paying Elon. Because Tom Hanks has the username Tom_Hanks.
You’re missing the point. You can have Tom.Hanks@twitter.com but you can’t have Tom_Hanks@othertwitter.com
So when you come to the fediverse, instead of searching for Tom_Hanks@tomhanks.com, you just search for Tom_Hanks, and the fediverse will know that defaults to the account Tom_Hanks. Which is the same account on Lemmy, the same account on Peertube, the same account on pixelfed.
Because it’s all Tom_Hanks.
Except Tom@TomHanks.com will come up first because they will surely have the most fooloerrs.
fooloerrs
Typo, but kind of a cool word too. Like people who would fool around
Oh god it looks like I had a stroke at the end of that sentence ahhaha
Reminds me of ICANN fucking up all the domain names.
CocaCola.com CocaCola.new CocaCola.drink Cocacola.world CocaCola.bev
Etc.
Shameful. One thing that might work for the fediverse is federal institutions running their own Mastadon instances on .gov to move away from announcements on Twitter. You can’t fake .gov domains.
@reddig33 you can actually (specially in france) but the point isn’t there
Never heard of email
I have a dream that one day I be part of a platform where one will not be judged by the glamor of their username but by the quality of their discourse.
Ah, yes, that’s a very good point. You’re the smartest man in the world!
Taylor Swift’s Twitter handle is @taylorswift13 and it doesn’t seem to be a problem for her.
Because there can only be one taylorswift13.
There aren’t multiple instances on twitter.
Even without federation and such it’s an issue. Old twitter actually did a really good job of this, but other social networks have had problems in the past,
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/katie-hopkins-impersonated-parler/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/02/republicans-parler-trolls-347737
We don’t have to guess if trolls will try to impersonate celebs and be successful at it, because it’s already happened elsewhere.
That said, there are two nice things about the fediverse. First, verification is explicitly not offered, so folks have to do the digging themselves to see if an account is official or not. (Which is as easy as checking a person’s web site). Or perhaps confusing a regular person’s account with a celeb of the same name.
Second, you can host your own instance. Celebs might not bother, but official gov’t agencies set up their own domains and websites - and in particular under domains like .gov which aren’t open to regular folks. So seeing if a gov’t agency is really authentic is potentially as simple as checking the domain that the instance is using.
I mean sure…but essentially you’re using the facts as they stand as justification that it will never work, when my whole point is that these facts as they stand need to change because they will never work unless we change them.
People keep using email, and domains as reasons for why it’s not an issue, but there’s a reason celebrities aren’t known for their email. You can tweet at celebrities, and you can follow celebrities on instagram, and all the other services, but you generally can’t email them.
Now, the reason for this is that celebrity wants to own the exact spelling and exact letter/number combination that they’re known for. I like to try to make things relatable to the person that I’m talking to, but let’s face it, abff08f4813c is a really really bad username for branding purposes. But, be that as it may, IF you were a celebrity, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on instagram, and everybody knew abff08f4813c on twitter, then if you were to come to the fediverse, you wouldn’t want a second abff08f4813c to exist. You would want to own “abff08f4813c” on every platform, even if you’re not on that platform. Even if you don’t use tiktok, you would want to make sure nobody else has the name abff08f4813c on tiktok.
The problem is, the fediverse is so fractured that’s not really logistically possible. Because if you try to sue one person on one other instance that has abff08f4813c, now suddenly 300 more abff08f4813c on 300 different instances all pop up.
What I’m suggesting is, no matter which instance you’re on, if you search abff08f4813c, the search should find that username, and direct you to the profile that corrilates with you. And even though that profile is only on one instance, it would make it so if I tried to make abff08f4813c, on another instance, I would be told that username is already taken.
From there, you could absolutely create an old twitter style verification system. And NOW celebrities will be more willing to use the fediverse. But until that changes, I don’t see any celebrity who values their own brand on an international scale, be willing to publically announce they are on the fediverse, and their fans can migrate to the fediverse to follow them.
My point is there could be a @taylorswift but it doesn’t matter because people know which account is hers.
@pruwybn same for drakes instagram (champagnepapi)
It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.
Yep. Also, aren’t there already celebrities on Mastodon? I know George Takei is. Granted, you’d have to know he was
@mastodon.socialversusmstdn.socialso that could complicate things for those unfamiliar with the platform.OP’s definitely got a point, though.
Kind of like the BBC has their own Mastodon server instead of being on someone elses.
But look below in the comments. Can you even tell which of my comments came from Lemmy.World, and which comments didn’t? Some platforms will just show Lost_My_Mind. I can’t tell which platform @AbouBenAdhem is posting via. I just see AbouBenAdhem.
Yes.
Use a better client that shows you the information? The default UI does, so that’s firmly a problem you’ve inflicted on yourself.
I’m just using a web browser that came with my phone. And if they were all hidden, it wouldn’t matter.
You’d just register your username. And this would be good for all the fediverse platforms. Once you register your innitial name, only you could register other services under that name. So it’s always you. Even if you never register for a service, you registered the name.
Then, if you register a new service, even years later, you still have your name.
Who manages that centralized service? What prevents it from being bought out, or attacked?
Because it’s not centralized. Every platform/instance just uses the same protocols. Any that try to go against that get defederated by all instances.
Any that try to go against that
How do you identify them? Lemm.ee registers Tom Hanks, does every other instance have to check what information they provided to trust them?
What prevents someone to bribe a small instance to register a celebrity username on their instance?
If anything we want to encourage this.
I like the example of SAG AFTRA hosting their own instance to be official, for example. Celebs typically have their own domains and websites, so easy enough to hire a team to create and manage their own instance that supports the celeb but federates. And you know it’s legit just because it’s on the celeb’s own domain. Ditto for gov’t agencies having their own instances.
I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)
I’m not using any client. I’m just using the browser that came with my cell phone.
One good thing IMO about threads federating, that we get the celebrities, we know they’re verified, but I don’t have to join corpo social media.
That’s a feature, not a bug. Celebrity culture needs to get in the sea.
If you are that famous or worried about trademark, you shouldn’t be using someone else’s server. Tom Hanks can just buy e.g
tomhanks.actordomain and set up the@me@tomhanks.actorAP actor.I keep repeating this: the weird part is that we still have all these companies and institutions being okay with depending on someone else’s namespace. Having the NYT still announcing their Twitter or Instagram for social media presence is the same as using aol.com for their email.
That’s why she hosts her own domain, instead of sending half a million followers to some random fediverse instance.
This solves the issues of having the same username across all platforms, assuming you host an instance for every platform you want to use. And also mske those domains private. But it doesn’t address that same username being used on another instance/domain.
Like imagine someone had the usernsme Ada@someoffensivedomain.social and was impersonating you. If you made your living off your name, an imposter would affect your image.
If I was making my living off of my name, I wouldn’t even know some random user with no followers from a troll domain exists.
Whatever the reason celebs don’t take to the fediverse, this isn’t it…
